h1ghlevelb1ts

Wau, that was quite a bit since I posted for the last time. I guess saying that I was busy is probably a lame excuse. However, I am not quite sure anymore what to think about the advice of people like Chad Folwer. In his otherwise very entertaining book "My Job Went to India" he recommends amongst other things to:
 

• 'Let your voice be heard' - meaning write a blog
• 'Release your code' - meaning contribute to open source
• 'Practise, Practise, Practise' - by for example participating in Top Coder competitions

All these things make perfect sense, but put them on top of a (at least) 40 hours working week, a girlfriend and a quite time consuming hobby like skydiving and you soon wish the day would have 48 hours :)

I learned quickly I just had do one thing at the time and for the last couple of months I decided to work on point two of the above list. So I got involved into Hibernate Search which combines two great Java technologies, namely Hibernate and the search engine Lucene. To be honest my contributions were rather modest, but nevertheless I am proud of the fact that Hibernate Search just a couple of days ago released its first 'GA' release. If you want to know more have a look at this article on The Server Side. If you are even more interested have a look the blog No Relation To...

I am not sure where this all is leading me, but right now I am just happy that I finally wrote again a few lines :)

--Hardy